Questions tagged [problem-users]
Users that disrupt the community through negligence or malicious activity can be regarded as problem users.
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A Q&A site I moderate is full of highly simple questions, and very low / slow community participation in moderation. Options?
A +10-year-old site that I moderate is full of "too simple questions". Blame whatever you like, groupthink, low community participation on moderating the site, blame me, etc.
I think that ...
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How can I take care of hate content while avoiding backlash for censoring anything I disagree with?
On any community site, there will be people who just want to you it as a platform to attack a person, group, or idea. How do I deal with it? Obviously, I could remove it. But often times that doesn't ...
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What should be done for the safety of the community when a member is suspected of their behavior?
WARNING: This question will mention cases such as self-harm.
I am building the setup of the community I have been planning to put together for a year now: It's called "Hear Me Rant". The ...
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Should disability be a mitigating factor or aggravating factor for code of conduct violation consequences?
This question was suggested in an aside in the question Is it more difficult for autistic people to adhere to a code of conduct (in written communication)? .
As the OP of the above question mentioned, ...
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Is it more difficult for autistic people to adhere to a code of conduct (in written communication)?
As a moderator on Stack Exchange, users suspended for rudeness have repeatedly argued along the lines of the following:
I am autistic and therefore I am unable to recognise when something I write is ...
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How To Deal With Impersonation?
Me and my friend are making a website which has a chat room on it. However since we do not have access to servers, and thus cannot use php or other languages used to make profile systems, the closest ...
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How to encourage users to report scammers in private settings
The Context:
Recently in a Discord server which I moderate, I've noticed there are a few problem users which pop up every now and again, which Direct Message random users, with a standard scam which ...
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What is the best way to control trolls and spammers without a profile system?
How do you control a growing community without profile systems (i.e. so users can't be warned, kicked, or banned reliably)?
I am making a website that is slowly getting around our school, but I have a ...
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How reasonable is it to hold chatbot authors accountable for their bots' behavior?
In a non-Stack Exchange online community, there is a chatbot that runs with the permission of the administrators. The primary purpose of the bot is to analyze the posts of others and suggest helpful ...
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Banned user status: visible Vs. invisible
When certain users are banned, some online communities do not display their banned status, while others do.
What I am not referring to
I am not referring to the visibility of the banned user from ...
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Several communities on one platform. How can moderators adjust the behaviour of a new user from a different community who has just joined my site?
We have a network of 100+ Q&A sites. A user active elsewhere on the network joins a new community and starts posting non-friendly answers and comments. A moderator contacts the user. The user ...
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How to handle a user who violates some rules in a way allows the user to save face while stopping bad behaviour?
Imagine that we have a Q&A website. A very active user of the site violates some rules (for example, creates a puppet account). Moderators agree that there is a problem, but they don’t want to ...
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How to mitigate sockpuppeting?
In web communities where voting on an item is an essential feature, the vote result could be easily biased by one single user if she register many accounts and vote. What approaches can mitigate ...
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How to handle immature and underaged users?
In various gaming and online role-playing communities I have seen very young (10-13 years old) and, what's more important, very immature users. If such a user is consistently delivering problems with ...
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User making false claims easily proved wrong, ban or answer?
I am a member of a non-profit organization (bike advocacy group), and deal with community management with a small team of other members. We recently published a Facebook post that caught us a bit by ...
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How do I ensure that new users read the rules?
dEvery community has its rules. Even deep-net chans do. Sometimes these rules are short, some times they are long, long walls of text. This question is inspired by online role-playing communities ...
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What should we do with a user who is using powers, solely given for technical tasks, to overreach and enforce rules?
We run a MediaWiki, where we have a good, contributing user who agreed to be given temporary powers as an administrator, explicitly with the instructions to only manage the protection and erasure of a ...
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We caught a pedo. Twice. What to do?
About a year ago we received a report from one of our users that they were getting inappropriate messages from another user. Upon investigation, we found child-grooming behaviour from the offender ...
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On a peer-to-peer internet network (e.g. IPFS), how is it possible to ensure users to seed content?
Projects like IPFS aim to revolutionize the Internet itself by laying it on new protocols, making it more stable and persistent; at the cost of the need of users seeding content, though.
In a torrent-...
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How to discourage a community from growing?
I have the opposite problem that many here probably have. I built a piece of software that was originally intended for myself and a handful of clients. I'm rather proud of it and it works very well ...
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Aside from moderation, what can I do to keep my online community as polite as possible?
I'm starting a new online community from scratch and I want to keep it professional and polite. What 'tips & trick' would you suggest to minimise the risk of it turning into a 'troll-cave'.
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How can I prevent the abuse of the reporting feature?
In my community we have an option to report a post breaking our rules and moderators to review them. Now we are having two major problems with this lately:
Users start to report an awful lot of posts ...
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Why should trolls not be fed?
A common advice on dealing with malicious users is:
Do not feed the troll!
What does this mean, what is the rationale behind this, and are there any exceptions?
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User with multiple accounts isn't technically breaking rules but is annoying the community; how should I respond as a moderator?
On Stack Exchange, there is no rule against a user having more than one account so long as the extra accounts aren't used to cheat (sockpuppet voting and the like). In fact, on some sites it might be ...
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How to deal with passive-agressive borderline trolls in an online game community?
As a moderator on a minecraft server (the type of game matters little), several times I had to deal with what I call "cocky passive-agressive borderline trolls": usually a smart, young user, that ...
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Are there any bad side effects of having a Dislike or Downvote button on a forum-based community? [duplicate]
We are still developing our forum community, and we're going to be having a "like button" where users can like a post or replies that they find interesting or like a post from a reputable or ...
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How to prevent external groups ruining a discussion?
If your community is having a discussion on a topic, such as whether to have a code of conduct and which one to adopt, how can you prevent external groups unrelated to the community, such as GamerGate,...
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How to deal with extremely rude Facebook troll?
I had a friend - well, call him one. Our relationship went worse and eventually, I had to block him.
He's still active on one of the social media pages of my community, though, and exploits it. He's ...
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What are some strategies for spiteful users?
I've had a user who was so angry about the direction of my community that he tracked down my personal contact information and employment information and started harassing my family and workplace.
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In a community designed for peaceful discussion, should topics which cause hate and strife be disallowed?
I am the administrator and leader of an online community designed for peaceful discussion of Christianity and other faiths, and any relevant events or topics. The community is a single thread, a wall ...
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Google Plus "!" account bots [closed]
I am a moderator on a Google Plus community and we have accounts that start with an "!" and some nonsense after it. Does anyone know where these come from and how to deal with them (in addition than ...
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How can I mitigate some of the more harmful effects of anonymous downvoting on the community?
This question is about a Stack Exchange site, but may also apply to other sites with similar voting mechanisms.
Stack Exchange, for better or worse, allows anonymous downvoting. People are strongly ...
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What Is The Point of Temporary Bans
I never understood the use case where it would be preferable to "temporarily ban" a user for a stated period of time.
If they've done something bad enough to warrant a ban, I'd think they wouldn't ...
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How to enforce an age limit
The problem I'm dealing with currently is the following: Very young users come in larger numbers to my online community. A lot of them are pretty immature and driving away good solid users that ...
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How can we plug a leak of confidential information?
I belong to a large, geographically-distributed social organization. Everything the group does is the result of dedicated volunteers. Within this organization we have an award that is akin to a "...
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I have to collect / raise money but my community refuses
Because of bureaucratic stuff, I'll have to demand more money from my members. It's not much, around 5€ a month. Each member already pays a membership fee (15€ / month) which is really fair and will ...
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Do I keep a troll around so that I can monitor them or ban them and let them spawn alternate accounts?
My community has a problem with a particular user. This user is very good at sitting right on the line of good vs bad user. They find themselves in arguments and flame wars frequently. In the context ...
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Why is the League of Legends community so toxic?
Expanding upon "How do I deal with online trolling/harassment in video games?" by discussing a specific case.
I keep hearing about ongoing toxicity issues with the LoL player community, with a ...
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As a community member, how can I mitigate backlash caused by an unintended breaking change?
I'm a member of a gaming community and a recent patch caused some severe breaking changes to the expected behavior of some user-generated content in the game. This has understandably made some users ...
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When is it acceptable to single out a user?
In a physical community, I've often wondered when it's crossing the line when calling out a specific user upon their behavior after general "warnings." I've personally never done it, but I was ...
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How do I deal with online trolling/harassment in video games?
How does one deal with online trolling/harassment in video games?
Examples of issues I have faced as a player:
Running a game with friends and having one random player join in and ruin it, ...
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How to save our community from being turned into an anarchist crackpot forum by an evil administrator?
This is some kind of a follow up of this same old issue where the problem was, that a malicious troll managed to split the moderator/administrator team of our small community.
The situation has now ...
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How to block an anonymous troll other than by IP(s)?
On our platform, we have the possibility to block registered users by user name or IP, whereas anonymous users can be blocked by IP only.
Also, we have some kind of a reputation system such that only ...
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What should be done about threats of physical violence?
What should be done about threats of physical violence?
Should moderators report serious threats to law enforcement? If so, will they care?
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How to keep your cool, if a mostly problematic user just drives you up the wall?
There is a user in our small community, who had caused a lot of trouble in the past while doing a few sporadic good contributions (mostly when he felt the need to improve his amount of points) too.
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What (if anything) should be done about users who publicly threaten to leave the community?
I am a moderator on a StackExchange site. Like many SE sites, ours has fairly specific community standards and customs with respect to things like comment deletion, closing questions, and the like.
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How to deal with a stubborn person who thinks they are perfect?
As the title already mentions I have a problem with a so-called "perfect" person.
I'm part of a studying community in which every age is allowed. So we are a really mixed community, we have older and ...
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How to deal with an online griefer that I know in real life?
I'm hosting a Minecraft server with 14 friends of mine playing on it. We peacefully build houses and structures, hold events, go kill the enderdragon, stuff like that. All is peaceful. Until one day, ...
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Can't ban and the physical world has no "ignore" button; how do we deal with a disruptive member?
I belong to a small, open community that meets in person and is largely run by consensus. (There is an organizational authority who can step in if something really requires that, but said person is ...
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Finding a new Mod after a rogue Mod damaged the system
So recently a moderator in my community went rogue and did considerable damage to my website. He deleted many users, removed posts, and then quit the forum angrily.
I recognize the bad decision to ...
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